The Coming Race

Beneath the earth lives a civilisation whose achievements make humanity seem primitive. Its greatest discovery may also be humanity's greatest danger.

In Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race, a traveller enters a subterranean world inhabited by the Vril-ya, a people who command a mysterious energy called Vril. Capable of healing and destruction, this force underpins their technology and helps sustain an orderly, highly advanced society. What first appears to be a revelation of human possibility gradually becomes a challenge to the visitor's confidence in his own species.

Published in 1871, this early science fiction novel combines the wonder of a hidden-world adventure with philosophical speculation and social satire. The Vril-ya offer an unfamiliar perspective on power, equality, and progress, while their potential dominion over the surface world casts a shadow across their apparent harmony. The book's enduring tension lies in the distance between admiration and fear: a society can seem enlightened without being safe for those outside it.

What readers find inside:
A subterranean world - An outsider's journey reveals a civilisation concealed beneath the familiar surface of the earth.The power of Vril - A single extraordinary energy gives its users the means both to preserve life and to destroy it.An unsettling ideal - The order and advancement of the Vril-ya invite questions about what makes a society desirable.Humanity reconsidered - The traveller must confront a people whose capabilities undermine his assumptions of human superiority.Progress and peril - Scientific possibility becomes inseparable from the threat posed by unequal power.
For readers of classic science fiction, hidden-world adventures, and philosophical novels, this is a thought-provoking encounter with an imagined society that remains difficult to dismiss as either paradise or nightmare.

Descend into the world of the Vril-ya and discover how quickly wonder can turn to unease.